whisper that the past is gone eternally

[paysforall]

It's the Shibuya Crossing. The big, famous one, with all the crowds and the traffic and the 109 building overlooking it all.

And that's the thing.

The 109 building.

Paying no mind to the sea of empty cognitions around him, a Goro Akechi stands in the center of the crosswalk, staring up at the number-faced building with a frown. If you were looking for any Goro Akechi in particular, however, this one almost transparently isn't him. Twenty-one years of age and dressed like the masculine line of a Victorian goth brand was thrown over his head like a bucket of cold water, this Akechi stares at one of the most familiar landmarks of Tokyo like it's a river in a desert and he hasn't quite decided if he wants to take a drink.

He's back.

(Or, at the very least, he's no longer where he was. Her Shibuya was a 109 as well. And there was that strange room...)

"If the Shibuya Game has gone down the shitter again," he says, seemingly addressing nobody, or possibly the phone he's pulled from his pocket to glare at, "I am going to go after the Composer myself."

He lifts his phone. (It's the same phone he's always had. The only thing that hasn't changed, for anyone with a keen enough eye for detail. There's a new vinyl sticker on the back, a stylized skull in red at an angle, but it's the same phone as ever.) Snaps a picture. No change in the photo. Closes that, opens a different app, snaps again. His frown intensifies.

(It is, by now, a good thing that the cognitions are just filler that will continue to idle in whatever routine they're running, because otherwise he would surely have been hit by a car, right? But the crowd continues to wander around him, heedlessly.)

Finally, he lowers his phone, sends the photo to someone on his contacts, and apparently gives up, shoving it back into his pocket. The cognitions resume the flow of normal traffic, clearing the crossing so that cars can pass through, as he goes over to Hachiko to lean up against the side of the statue.

"I didn't miss the not having any idea what's going on," he tells the dog, firmly firmly and with a hint of melancholy. "Oh, if only a real person would show up with the answers right about now. Why, I'd even consider buying them a coffee for the trouble."

Despite nominally being addressed to the bronze canine, the way he lifts the volume of his voice makes it clear that it's addressed to you, onlooker, whoever you are.

[[OOC: I don't actually care what format you use i just always write introspective-y starters in prose. tldr twewy au post-canon post-death akechi]

Comments

cw some discussion of suicidality

[paysforall]

"I thought I was until I stood looking it in the face."

It's plenty easy to talk about coming to terms with death when it's in the abstract. But actually getting there changes people - is one of the things known most for changing people. The media loves a good story about people who reformed after a near-death experience. If they had access to the number of people who reformed after a death-death experience, they'd eat those up, too.

"It's the same for suicides, isn't it? Most of the ones who survive the attempt talk about how they realized that they didn't actually want to die at all. And then my job gets the same from the ones who succeeded - people who stare at us in shock like I wasn't supposed to actually die when they've jumped off a building or what have you."

He knows what a fraught subject suicide is, for them. His tone isn't light and loose like it has been, as he talks about it. It's not outright saying any of the things implied by his past self as good as saying, I didn't want to not die.

"Besides, I was presented with prima facie evidence of my own desire to live, afterwards. That I don't deny it any longer is also a benefit of hindsight."

me? alive? surely not

[pancakeboy]

"... it's not that I don't want to live. In theory." He walks next to the other. The alley is getting, if anything, deeper and darker. "I just don't see a life after all of this that I'd care to live. Or a route out that leaves me with one."

A failure of imagination, of lateral thinking? Perhaps. But he has thought so often of ways to break his chains, and he sees none he dares to take.

[paysforall]

"Well, you didn't want a power of friendship lecture, so I won't give you one." It's there if he wants it, but continuing to stress the point - at least in a straightforward, Phanton-Thieves kind of way, is only counterproductive with someone who doesn't want to listen.

"My advice instead... Consider every path laid before you. Not for what's most or least likely to happen, but for what the worst outcome of that path is. Then choose whichever of those you're okay with happening."

They're a pessimist to the core, after all. No amount of thinking about nice things that could happen will be able to overcome the bitter expectation that they won't. Therefore, pick the least-bad option.

The alleyway has gotten far too gloomy and long, and he wants his sushi. The Reaper Akechi does the cognitive equivalent of kicking the engine to jumpstart it, and in the next block or so, they emerge from the alleyway back onto the main streets, only a block or two from their destination.

[pancakeboy]

... huh, look at that. He's sure that alley looked deeper and darker, just a few minutes before. "It's like the place is playing tricks on us."

He does, eventually, hook one thumb into his blazer pocket. Just one, almost so you wouldn't notice. "You think I don't already consider all the paths? That isn't the problem. It's more that so often, there's only one. Or none."

Ginza is very bright at this time of day, and the cognitions milling around stink of performative wealth far more than their real-world counterparts did. He ignores them, aggressively.

[paysforall]

"That means you're only considering the paths that are palatable to you."

It is, perhaps, sharp and a little cutting. But he didn't promise to not be an asshole, he promised sushi and no power of friendship speeches.

"Though I'll admit you've harshly limited your sympathy pool if you've already killed Okumura. You've done that, haven't you?"

He's testing the waters.

[pancakeboy]

For fuck's sake. Okumura herself didn't confront him so blatantly. "Okumura had it coming. If you tell me otherwise, I'll know you're full of shit."

They've arrived at the entrance to Takazakaya, with its gilded arch and its immaculately dressed windows; the closest entrance will take them through the beauty department. Akechi takes it, ignoring the fussing cognitions nearby. The sushi concession, strictly invite-only, is on the top floor.

He makes his way past branded makeup counters, glancing at the skincare displays as they go. "Getting myself killed wasn't an option. Cutting things short wasn't an option. I take it we're not here to judge my priorities."

[paysforall]

"Oh, he absolutely did. But the Phantom Thieves don't see it that way."

For his part, the older Akechi doesn't even blink at the displays, his attention focused on two things - the younger him, and the sushi counter that lies in the near future. The only thought he has is that it's surprising that the Variabeauties never sued for a cosmetics shop to be added to the list of those that take Game money.

"I won't give you a friendship lecture. But I will tell you a lesson you should have picked up by now: Use the useful. And I don't just mean to throw them at Shido's Palace to cut a path for you."

He steps onto an escalator and leans against the side wall in a way that looks way too natural for the fact that he's only actually touching it by means of an elbow on the moving hand rail.

"They want to help, so let them. Suck up everything you can get out of their good will and jump free at the end. They're a lot easier to escape than Shido and his goons."

And if his younger self learns the actual meaning of friendship along the way? Well, congratulations to him.

[pancakeboy]

And, on the escalator, his mouth wrinkles up. That's the opposite of what he wants to do. He doesn't want them near him. He's been keeping them at arms' length as best he can—not just to manage their expectations, but also for himself. This is a purely give-and-take relationship. I don't think I'll be seeing you like this any more....

"I know I have no choice. I don't need you to tell me that, and you're not the first to say it. The obvious first step is to engage them to keep Amamiya—" not Ren, quite abruptly—"alive."

He rounds the corner to the next escalator with the air of a crane stalking a frog—or like someone with a broom handle stuck up his ass. "And they'll do it because he's their friend. Not because of your—poorly disguised power-of-friendship lecture." He's not six.

[paysforall]

"I promise you, if I was going to give you a power of friendship lecture, you'd know. Mine starts with Trust your partner and tends to circle around that point."

That's the version the Game beat into him, after all.

Next escalator, again with the weird lean. "They get to believe they've made a difference in your life - saved someone who was beyond saving, so on so forth. You get your life and probably even to actually witness Shido's fall in the process. If I could do it again with what I know now, I would in a heartbeat."

He'd even pay an Entry Fee for it. Maybe not the same one, because that would make juggling the whole thing a little difficult (but then, he's not as afraid of showing his true self as his counterpart).